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European Memory in Populism

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European Memory in Populism European Memory in Populism Representations of Self and Other Edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ayhan Kaya First Published 2020 ISBN: 978-1-138-31811-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45481-3 (ebk) Chapterp 4 ‘A great bliss to keep the sensation of conquest alive!’ The emotional politics of the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul Gönül Bozog˘lu (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Chapter 4 ‘A great bliss to keep the sensation of conquest alive!’ The emotional politics of the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul Gönül Bozog˘lu Introduction The quotation in the title of this chapter is from a comment endorsing the Panorama 1453 Museum, made upon its opening in 2009 by Özleyis Topbaş, wife of the then-mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbaş. 1 Until recently, the comment was used to market the museum on its website, alongside others by prominent members or supporters of the conservative-Islamist administration of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, henceforth JDP). The JDP has focused significant effort on fostering public memory of the capture of the Byzantine city of Constantinople on 29 May 1453. Festivities, re-enactments, public imagery, and the spectacular Panorama 1453 Museum tell a glorious story of the Ottoman victory and the magnanimous treatment of the defeated Byzantines. In these narratives, public audiences are invited to identify with the Ottomans, and to celebrate a ‘Turkish’ claim to presence reliant on the Hadith in which the conquest is prophesied. Meanwhile, references to the Ottoman past in JDP discourse are frequent. One aim of this chapter is to foreground the interplay of official heritage and political discourse. Here I will argue that in the populist rhetoric and cultural interventions of the JDP the historic, expansionist encroachment on others is glorified, and Islam is placed at the heart of the story of Turkish identity and homeland, contrary to the secular, Westernized identity of the early Republic. A second aim of this chapter is to analyze the responses to this governmental and authorized heritage by visitors whom I surveyed though short interviews. Here, the politics and affects of people’s encounters with the Conquest in the museum need to be related, on the one hand, to the emotional appeals of the JDP’s nostalgic populism – which concerns the need to recover a glorious past that has been stolen by political foes – and, on the other, to visitors’ resent- ment towards those very foes: the disempowered secular elites. These, rather than the Byzantines, are the real enemy for the museum’s audiences. Finally, this chapter explores the social and political role of the museum in provid- ing a space for the expression of animosity. This consolidates social division and polarization in the interests of the status quo, while also representing the 92 Gönül Bozog˘lu overlaps between political, emotional, and memory cultures and communities. In exploring this, I seek to work in alignment with recent thinking in heritage studies that develops understandings of the interrelations between historical memory culture, politics, and emotion, as exemplified by Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell: If we accept that heritage is political, that it is a political resource used in conflicts over the understanding of the past and its relevance for the pres- ent, then understanding how the interplay of emotions, imagination and the process of remembering and commemoration are informed by people’s culturally and socially diverse affective responses must become a growing area of focus for the field. ( 2015 : 18) In this chapter it is Ottoman heritage that is the ‘political resource’ described above. This is because it offers a compendium of values that can be mined by party-political actors to present ideals of national identity and citizenship. At the same time, my research found that such official attempts to ‘bring back’ the Ottoman past as national history – foregrounding 1453 and not 1923 (the foundation of the Turkish Republic) – was a potent means of tapping into conservative-Islamist audiences’ sense of long suffering and suppression under the stridently secularist regimes prior to JDP ascendancy. This means that remembering the Conquest is bound up with a sense of loss, anger, and antag- onistic reference to one’s enemies at home, alongside a sense that it is finally possible to return to a true identity after decades of injustice. In the 1994 local elections, an Islamist party – the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi ) – won a decisive victory and conservative-Islamist mayors were installed in many municipalities, including Istanbul; then, in the 1995 general elections, the party won the majority of the vote. With the rise of the Welfare Party, the promi- nence of Islam in the public domain increased ( Göle, 1997 ; Navaro-Yashin, 2002 ) and Ottoman history became yet more visible ( White, 2014 : 8–9). The change also occurred in celebration and commemorations of national historical moments. The key events identified by Ottoman historiography were not celebrated during the early Republican era ( Çınar, 2001: 365). Rather, during that time new national days were ‘invented’ in the sense articulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger ([1983]1992) to commemorate Atatürk and the reforms of the early Republic. These include 29 October (the foundation of Turkey in 1923), 23 April (the First Assembly was established in Ankara in 1922; Atatürk devoted this date to children), and 19 May (the date that Atatürk started the War of Liberation). Alongside this is a prominent visual culture relating to Atatürk – who, we should recall, died in 1938 – including literally thousands of photographic and sculptural images of him in public space, not to mention the proliferation of his image in people’s houses, or his signature, replicated in bumper stickers and tattoos. Emotional politics of the Panorama 1453 Museum 93 Nevertheless, in recent years the JDP has moved away from big public cel- ebrations associated with the Republic, to focus instead on Islamic and Otto- man ones. Instead of the celebration of the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, historical events like the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 have become more central in the public and official sphere, through celebrations and festivities ( Çınar, 2001 ). The Conquest was not absent from state histo- riography or public commemoration before the changes described above (it was celebrated in 1953, for example), but was of second-order significance compared to the public memory culture relating to Atatürk. In 1994 Erdoğan became mayor of Istanbul, and since then celebrations of the Ottoman past have taken place and gained more stridently Islamist character (Zurcher, 2016 ). This has involved what I have elsewhere called ‘memory wars’ ( Bozoğlu, 2020 ), in which memory actors, who are also political actors, more or less associated with party positions, have sought to destabilize or erase memory cultures that they see as inimical to their own. The memory cultures of Atatürk exist today in a tense interrelationship with those of Neo-Ottomanism. But in many ways they also influence and depend on one another, for the stories of heroism and victory are comparable and each relies on its righteous and intransigent opposition to the other. This makes it particularly important for the current administration to invest in the grandeur of 1453. In the anniversary celebra- tions, re-enactments of the battle symbolically ‘perform the conquest again’ ( Çınar, 2001 ; Büyüksaraç, 2004; Hürriyet Daily News, 2016). There is also often a re-enactor who plays the role of Sultan Mehmet on his white horse, ‘re-entering’ the city. The meanings of these re-enactment practices can be seen to connect to official practice in museums, and also to political discourse, media representations, and global power plays: as part of the 2017 celebra- tions, 1,453 lorries were assembled as a world record attempt in a vehicular parade to mark construction of the new Istanbul airport – a past-present relay between the might and achievement of the Ottomans and contemporary Tur- key as global powerhouse. One of the dimensions of so-called neo-Ottomanism is the use of a selective account of the Ottoman past to power identity constructions among the citi- zenry in the present ( Girard, 2015 : 3). The JDP’s project to rewrite national history with an emphasis on the Ottoman past has been subject to significant and extensive attention and critique.2 In one authorized heritage discourse ( Smith, 2006 ), the Ottoman past is presented as a source of pride, and a com- pendium of virtues and values for people to emulate: indomitable strength, valour, self-sacrifice, and piety. As part of a public discourse of ancestry and descendence, promoted by JDP actors, some people make elective, highly emotional connections between themselves and ‘the Ottomans’, construct- ing historical continuities that position them as the inheritors of a legacy of greatness that should be preserved and restored. This discourse, together with immersive spectacles in which people can imagine themselves as Ottomans within the historic scene of the Conquest, are what Geoffrey Cubitt (2007 ) 94 Gönül Bozog˘lu terms ‘cultural devices’. These enable people to incorporate a remote past into autobiographical memory, and to bridge the dissonance between past and present: as Topbaş says, to ‘keep the sensation of the Conquest alive’. This also occurs in forms of temporal bridging across public and private space: it is possible to buy neo-Ottoman houses; Ottoman clothes are fashionable for events such as circumcision celebrations; JDP politicians break ground for new grand projects on 29 May (the day of the Conquest); Ottoman military music is played in public spaces during Ramadan; and Erdoğan often surrounds him- self with men dressed up as Janissary Guards during official appearances. All of these, and many other examples that there is no space to cite, normalize a practice of shuttling between past and present that forecloses any sense of cultural difference between the two.
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